A dispirited Erick Erickson looked at the results in Mississippi and grew introspective:

I continue to oppose a third party. I’m just not sure what the Republican Party really stands for any more other than telling Obama no and telling our own corporate interests yes. That’s not much of a platform.

I have to agree. It wasn’t much of a platform when Mitt Romney ran on telling Obama no and telling our corporate interests yes. But what really has Erick Erickson upset is how Senator Thad Cochran beat state Sen. Chris McDaniel.

A Republican Party campaigning on making the Senate “conservative,” used black people liberal Democrats to preserve an incumbent Republican and defeat a conservative. The actual conservatives are the outsiders with the GOP establishment doing all it could to preserve its power at the expense of its principles…

Mississippi is a crystalizing election in that sense. Cochran is, for all intents and purposes, a marionette. His strings are pulled by staffers and lobbyists. They drop him onto the stage of the Senate and pull up a string to raise his hand. These puppeteers are so invested in keeping their gravy train going that they will, while claiming to be Republicans, flood a Republican primary with black people Obama voters to ensure their gravy train continues.

Just to be clear, this isn’t about the rules; it’s about the black people.

And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with that. They won fair and square. They changed who the electorate was, which was allowed under the rules.

But this becomes a longer term problem for the Republican Party. Its core activists hate its leadership more and more.

The federal government gives more than twice as much money annually to Mississippi than it collects in taxes and fees. You can call that a gravy train if you want, but running for office on a platform of cutting off your constituents’ gravy train is bizarre. The truth is, the kind of fiscally austere conservatism advocated by the Tea Party simply isn’t in the interests of Mississippians.

But the conservative movement has become a one-size-fits-all ideology, ironically, where every population is fed the same anti-federal government rhetoric regardless of their particular relationship to the federal government. Given the state’s history, it’s understandable that people there are wary of the long arm of Washington DC, but the fiscal part of that relationship has been tremendously beneficial to the Magnolia State, and their senators understand this. That doesn’t make them corrupt, or any more corrupt than senators from other states who look out for their own interests.

With a population that is 37% black, Mississippi has by far the biggest black population percentage-wise in the country. In order for Republicans to win there, they need whites to vote for them in overwhelming numbers, which means that the GOP has every incentive to racialize politics and insist that the Democrats are the party exclusively for blacks. This prevents them (because they’ve already alienated blacks so badly) from pursuing the only alternative to racial politics, which is more moderate policies that can appeal to blacks.

But Cochran showed last night that a Republican can get blacks to go to the polls for them if they show them some respect, ask for their vote, and at least offer something that might interest them, like protecting their voting rights. Republicans can win that way, but not inflexible Movement Conservatives. For them, pandering to blacks is the biggest sin of all.

So, what we learned last night is that the Mississippi Republican Party is basically split 50-50 on what’s more important to them: being the anti-black party or keeping those federal dollars coming.

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